The Primacy of the Political

The overarching question for the project was what idea of the political could unite such an ideologically diverse group. The definition that can be discerned from the group’s discussions on various issues can be described as the way in which a political community, in modern society, the territorial state, represents itself symbolically.

Given the symbolic power that history has come to have in modern society – the notion that societies evolve – I have focused primarily on their analyses of how the historical orientation of societies can be understood as a type of symbolic representation.

Through the work on this question, the question was raised of how different ways of orienting oneself temporally interact with other symbolic categories in modern society, and in particular the special position that the principle of equality occupies. In connection with my interest in this question, which in time coincided with my move from the history of ideas and science to political science, it also became important to relate their discussions regarding equality to other, English-language interpretations of the principle of equality.

In the same way, in order to better understand the specificity of their analyses of the effects of human rights in modern society, I gradually became interested in how their analyses relate to the English-language discussions of the history of human rights in the field known as the historical turn.